Part 10

Hence, however, religion depends upon an {144} ever-renewed testing of its opinions through a carrying of them out in life. Insight would be barren were it not quickened and applied through our will. To James, as we already know, reason, as such, seems to be of little use in religion. But action, resolute living, testing of your faith through your works and through its own workings, this is religion--an endlessly restless and dramatic process, never an union with any absolute attainment of the goal.

V

Now in what way can I hope, you may ask, to answer these impressive and to many recent writers decisive considerations of the pragmatists? My answer, like my foregoing statement of my own form of idealism, depends upon extremely simple considerations. Their interest for our discussion lies in the fact that they have to do with the relation between reason and action, and between the real world and the human will. As a fact, the will as well as the reason is a source of religious insight. No truth is a saving truth--yes, no truth is a truth at all unless it guides and directs life. Therein I heartily agree with current pragmatism and with James himself. On the other hand, the will is a collection of restless caprices unless it is unified by a rational ideal. And no truth can have any workings at all, without even thereby showing itself to be, just in so far as it actually works, an eternal {145} truth. And, furthermore, what I have asserted about the insight which the reason gives us is so far from being opposed to the pragmatist's facts, that every rational consideration of the type of truth which they define leads us back to the consideration of absolute truth and to the assertion of an all-inclusive insight. Only, when we view this all-inclusive insight from the point of view which the pragmatists now emphasise (and which I myself have emphasised from a period long antedating the recent pragmatist movement), such a fair estimate of the insight of reason transforms our first and superficial opinion of its nature and of its meaning. It becomes the insight of a rational will, whose expression is the world, and whose life is that in which we too live and move and have our being.

Let me briefly dwell on each of the considerations which I here have in mind. To me, as a philosophical student, they are not new; for, as I repeat, I insisted upon them years ago, before the modern pragmatistic controversy began.

First, then, there are certain respects in which I fully agree with recent pragmatism. I agree that every opinion expresses an attitude of the will, a preparedness for action, a determination to guide a plan of action in accordance with an idea. Whoever asserts anything about the way out of the woods, or about the cause and possible cure of a toothache, defines a course of action in accordance with some purpose, and amongst other things predicts the {146} possible outcome of that course of action. The outcome that he predicts is defined in terms of experience, and, so far as that is possible, in terms of human experience. And now this is true, not only of assertions or opinions about toothaches. It is true also of assertions about all objects in heaven or earth. There is no such thing as a purely intellectual form of assertion which has no element of action about it. An opinion is a deed. It is a deed intended to guide other deeds. It proposes to have what the pragmatists call "workings." That is, it undertakes to guide the life of the one who asserts the opinion. In that sense, all truth is practical. If you assert a proposition in mathematics, you propose to guide the computations, or other synthetic processes, of whoever is interested in certain mathematical objects. If you say "There is a God," and know what you mean by the term "God," you lay down some sort of rule for such forms of action as involve a fitting acknowledgment of God's being and significance. So far, then, I wholly side with the pragmatists. There is no pure intellect. There is no genuine insight which does not also exist as a guide to some sort of action.

Furthermore, the proper "workings" of an assertion, the rational results of the application of this opinion to life, must, if the assertion is true, agree with the expectations of the one who defines the assertion. And these "workings" belong, indeed, to the realm of actual and concrete experience, be this {147} experience wholly human, or be it, in some respect, an experience which is higher and richer than any merely human experience. Opinions are active appeals to real life--a life to which we are always seeking to adjust ourselves, and in which we are always looking to find our place. The quest for salvation itself is such an effort to adjust our own life to the world's life. And if the world's life finds our efforts to define our relation to the world's actual and perfectly concrete experience inadequate, then our assertions are in just so far false; they lead in that case to blundering actions. We fail. And in such cases our opinions, indeed, "do not work."

All this I myself insist upon. But next I ask you to note that the very significance of our human life depends upon the fact that we are always undertaking to adjust ourselves to a life, and to a type of experience, which, concrete and real though it is, is never reducible to the terms of any purely human experience. Were this not the case; were not every significant assertion concerned with a type and form of life and of experience which no man ever gets; were not all our actions guided by ideas and ideals that can never be adequately expressed in simply human terms; were all this, I say, not the case, then--neither science nor religion, neither worldly prudence nor ideal morality, neither natural common-sense nor the loftiest forms of spirituality would be possible. Here I can only repeat, but now with explicit reference to the active aspect of our opinions {148} and of our experience, the comments that I made in my former lecture. Man as he is experiences from moment to moment. What is here and now, not future "workings," not past expectations, but the present--this is what he more immediately gets and verifies. These momentary experiences of his, these pains and these data of perception, are what he can personally verify for himself. And to this life in each instant he is confined, so far as his own personal and individual experience is concerned. But man _means_, he _intends_, he _estimates_, he _judges_ life, not as it appears to him at any one instant, but as "in the long run," or "for the common-sense of mankind," or as "from a rational point of view" he holds that it ought to be judged. Now I again insist--there is not one of us who ever directly observes in his own person what it is which even the so-called common-sense of mankind is said to verify and find to be true. The experience which "mankind" is said to possess is not merely the mere collection of your momentary feelings or perceptions, or mine. It is a conceived integral experience which no individual man ever gets before him. When we conceive it, we first treat it as something impersonal. If it is personal, the person who gets it before him is greater than any man. Yet unless some such integral experience is as concrete and genuine a fact, as real a life, as any life that you and I from moment to moment lead, then all so-called "common-sense" is meaningless. But if such an integral experience {149} is real, then that by which the pragmatic "workings" of our private and personal opinions are to be tested and are tested is a certain integral whole of life in which we all live and move and have our being, but which is no more the mere heap and collection of our moments of fragmentary experience, and of our vicissitudes of shifting moods, than a symphony is a mere collection of notes on paper, or of scraped strings and quivering tubes, or of air waves, or even of the deeds of separate musicians.

The life, then, the experience, the concrete whole, wherein our assertions have their workings, with which our active ideas are labouring to agree, to which our will endlessly strives to adjust itself, in which we are saved or lost, is a life whose touch with our efforts is as close as its superiority to our merely human narrowness is concretely and actively triumphant whenever our pettiness gets moulded to a higher reasonableness. And unless such a life above our individual level is real, our human efforts have no sense whatever, and chaos drowns out the meaning of the pragmatists and of the idealists alike. _If one asks, however, by what workings our significant assertions propose to be judged, I answer, by their workings as experienced and estimated from the point of view of such a larger life, as conforming to its will, or falling short thereof, as leading toward or away from our salvation._ For it is just such a larger life by which we all propose and intend to be judged, whenever we make our active appeal to life take the {150} form of any serious assertion whatever. If a man proposes to let his ideas be tested not by his momentary caprice, and not by any momentary datum of experience, but by "what proves to be their workings in the long run," then already he is appealing to an essentially superhuman type of empirical test and estimate. For no man taken as this individual ever personally experiences "the long run," that is, the integral course and meaning, the right estimate and working of a long series of experiences and deeds. For a man individually observes now this moment and now that--never their presupposed integration, never their union in a single whole of significant life.

If a man says that the workings of his ideas are to be tested by "scientific experience," then again he appeals not to the verdict of any human observer, but to the integrated and universalised and relatively impersonal and superpersonal synthesis of the results of countless observers.

And so, whatever you regard as a genuine test of the workings of your ideas is some living whole of experience above the level of any one of our individual human lives. To this whole you indeed actively appeal. The appeal is an act of will. And in turn you regard that to which you appeal as an experience which is just as live and concrete as your own, and which carries out its own will in that it snubs or welcomes your efforts with a will as hearty as is your own. For what estimates your deeds, {151} and gives them their meaning, is a life as genuine as yours and an activity as real as yours. Pragmatism is perfectly justified in regarding the whole process as no mere contemplation, no merely restful or static conformity of passive idea to motionless insight, but, on the contrary, as a significant interaction of life with life and of will with will. But the more vital the process, the more pragmatic the test of our active opinions through the conformity or non-conformity of their purposes to the life wherein we dwell and have our being, the more vital becomes the fact that, whether we are saved or lost, we belong to the world's life, and are part thereof, while, unless this life is more than merely human in its rational wealth of concrete meaning, we mortals have no meaning whatever, and the assertions of common-sense as well as of religion lapse into absurdity.

VI

In order fairly to estimate aright our relation to this larger life, we must briefly review the further thesis upon which recent pragmatism lays so much stress--the thesis that, since the truth of an opinion consists in the agreement or disagreement of its empirical workings with their anticipated consequences, all truth is both temporal and relative and cannot be either eternal or absolute. Let me then say a word as to the absoluteness of truth.

The thesis of pragmatism as to the active nature {152} and the practical meaning of all opinions may be illustrated by a simile that, as I think, well brings out the sense in which, as I hold, pragmatism itself is a true doctrine. Any sincere opinion announces a plan of action whereby we are, in some way, to adjust ourselves for some purpose to a real object. That is, an opinion lays down, in some form, a rule for some sort of conduct. This rule is of course valid only for one who has some specific interest in the object in question. For you can guide action only by appealing to the will of the one whom you guide. This is the pragmatist's view of the nature of all assertions and opinions. And so far, as you already know, I agree with the pragmatist. This account is correct.

This being so, we can, for the sake of a simile, compare any definite opinion to the counsel that a coach may give to a player whom he is directing. The player wants to "play the game." He therefore accepts its rules, and has his interests in what the pragmatists call "the concrete situation." The player, at any point in his training or in his activities as a player, may also accept the coach's guidance, and put himself under the coach's directions. If, hereupon, the player acts in accordance with what the coach ordains, the coach's directions have "workings." Their "workings" are in so far the deeds of the player. These deeds, if the issues of the game are sharply defined, are what we may call hits or misses. That is, each one of them either is {153} what, for the purposes of the game and the player, it ought to be, or else it is not what it ought to be. And each act of the player is a hit or a miss in a perfectly objective sense, as a real deed belonging to a world whose relations are determined by the rules and events of the game and by the purposes of the whole body of players.

Applying the simile to the case of assertions, we may say: An assertion is an act whereby our deeds are provided with a sort of coaching. Life itself is our game. Opinions coach the active will as to how to do its deed. If the opinion is definite enough, and if the active will obeys the coach, the opinion has "workings." These workings are our intelligent deeds, which translate our opinions into new life. If our purposes are definite enough, and if the issues of life are for us sharply defined, these deeds are, with reference to our purposes, either hits or misses, either successful or unsuccessful acts, either steps toward winning or steps toward failure. All this is surely concrete enough. And, in real life, this account applies equally to the practical situations of the workshop or of the market-place, and to the ideas and deeds of a religious man seeking salvation.

But now one of the central facts about life is that every deed once done is _ipso facto_ irrevocable. That is, at any moment you perform a given deed or you do not. If you perform it, it is done and cannot be undone. This difference between what {154} is done and what is left undone is, in the real and empirical world, a _perfectly absolute difference._ The opportunity for a given individual deed returns not; for the moment when that individual deed can be done never recurs. Here is a case where the rational constitution of the whole universe gets into definite relation to our momentary experience. _And if any one wants to be in touch with the "Absolute"--with that reality which the pragmatists fancy to be peculiarly remote and abstract--let him simply do any individual deed whatever and then try to undo that deed. Let the experiment teach him what one means by calling reality absolute. Let the truths which that experience teaches any rational being show him also what is meant by absolute truth._

For this irrevocable and absolute character of the deed, when once done, rationally determines an equally irrevocable character about the truth or falsity of any act of judgment, of any assertion or opinion, which has actually called in a concrete situation for a given deed, and which therefore has had this individual deed for any part of its intended "workings." Let us return to the simile of the game. Suppose the coach to counsel a given deed of the player. Suppose the player, acting on the coach's advice, to perform that deed, to make that play. Suppose the play to be a misplay. The play, once made, cannot be recalled. It stands, if the rules of the game require it so to stand, on the score. If it stands there, then just _that_ item of the score {155} can never be changed under the rules of the game. The score is, for the game, absolute and irrevocable. If the coach counselled that misplay, his counsel was an error. And just as the player's score cannot be changed without simply abandoning the rules of the game, so too the coach's record as a blunderer is, in respect of this one bit of counsel, unalterable. Analogous results hold for the player's successful hits and for the coaching that required them. All this is no result of abstractions or of bare theory. It is the result of having the will to play the game. It is the absolute truth that results from joining definite practical issues.

Returning to life, we must say: If our assertions have a determinate meaning, they get their concrete workings through counselling determinate individual deeds. Each deed, as an individual act, is irrevocable and is absolutely what it is. Our deeds, judged in the light of a reasonable survey of life--a survey of life such as that to which, when we form our opinions, and when we act on our opinions, we intend to appeal--are, for a determinate purpose, either hits or misses. If the issues of life in question when we act are definite enough, our deeds, under the rules of the game of life, cannot avoid this character of being the right deeds or the wrong deeds for the purpose in question and in view of their actual place in real life. Whoever so acts that his deeds are done, as a cant phrase has it, "with a string attached to them"--that is, whoever regards {156} his deeds as having only relative reality, as capable of being recalled if he chooses, is not acting seriously. He is not, as they say, really "playing the game." And, as a fact, he is trifling with absolute reality. He is not only not serious; he views real life as it absolutely is not. For whatever individual deed he actually does is absolutely irrevocable, whether he wants to recall it or not. Once done, it stands eternally on the world's score.

Now I insist, whatever assertion, or opinion, regarded as itself an expression of one's will, has for its intended working one of these irrevocable deeds, is in so far forth true, as the individual deed which it counsels is for the required purpose quite irrevocably a right deed when estimated with reference to this purpose and to the life into whose score it enters. That is, the opinion is true in so far as the working which it counsels is a deed that is in fact a hit in the chosen game of life under the rules of that game. And whatever opinion counsels a deed that, as the working of this opinion, is a miss in the game of life, is a false opinion. And, so I insist, _this distinction between the truth and falsity of an opinion that counsels an individual deed is as absolute and irrevocable as is the place of the deed when once done on the score of the game of life._

Whoever denies this position simply trifles with the very nature of all individual facts of experience; trifles also with life and with his own decisive will. Every serious man does his daily business with an {157} assurance that, since his deeds are irrevocable, his guiding opinions, that counsel his individual deeds give, in an equally irrevocable way, right or wrong guidance, precisely in so far as they get their workings concretely presented in his deeds. And this view about life is no philosopher's abstraction. It is the only genuinely concrete view. Its contradiction is not merely illogical, but practically inane. I cannot do a deed and then undo it. Therefore I cannot declare it to be for a determinate purpose the right individual deed at this point in life, and then say that I did not really mean that counsel to be taken as simply and therefore absolutely true. Absolute reality (namely, the sort of reality that belongs to irrevocable deeds), absolute truth (namely, the sort of truth that belongs to those opinions which, for a given purpose, counsel individual deeds, when the deeds in fact meet the purpose for which they were intended)--these two are not remote affairs invented by philosophers for the sake of "barren intellectualism." _Such absolute reality and absolute truth are the most concrete and practical and familiar of matters._ The pragmatist who denies that there is any absolute truth accessible has never rightly considered the very most characteristic feature of the reasonable will, namely, that it is always counselling irrevocable deeds, and therefore is always giving counsel that is for its own determinate purpose irrevocably right or wrong precisely in so far as it is definite counsel.

{158}

One of the least encouraging features of recent discussion is the prominence and popularity of those philosophical opinions which are always proclaiming their "concrete" and "practical" character, while ignoring the most vital and concrete feature of all voluntary life. For the very essence of the will is that, at every moment of action, it decides absolute issues, because it does irrevocable deeds, and therefore, if intelligent at all, is guided by opinions that are as absolutely true or false as their intended workings are irrevocable. I repeat: If you want to know what an absolute truth is, and what an absolute falsity, do anything whatever, and then try to undo your deed. You will find that the opinion which should counsel you to regard it as capable of being undone gives you simply and absolutely false coaching as to any game of life whatever. Every effort to undo your deed is a blunder. Every opinion that you can undo is a trivial and absolutely false absurdity. Just such triviality and absurdity belong to the thesis that absolute truth is an unpractical and inaccessible abstraction.

VII

If, with such a view of the nature of absolute truth, we turn back to estimate the sense in which our opinions about the world as a whole can be true or false, we now see that our account both of the insight of the reason, and of the nature of the world, {159} has become enriched by this whole analysis of the nature of opinion. _Opinions about the universe are counsels as to how to adjust your deeds to the purposes and requirements which a survey of the whole of the life whereto your life belongs shows to be the genuinely rational purposes and requirements._ Every such opinion then, whether true or false, is an effort to adjust your will and your conduct to the intents of a supreme will which decides values, establishes the rule of life, estimates purposes in the light of complete insight. That is, the insight to which your opinions appeal is indeed the insight of a real being who values, estimates, establishes, decides, as concretely as you do, and who is therefore not only all-wise, but possessed of a will. Your search for salvation is a seeking to adjust yourself to this supreme will. That such a will is real is as true as it is true that any opinion whatever which you can form with regard to the real world is either true or false. However ignorant you are, you are, then, in constant touch with the master of life; for you are constantly doing irrevocable deeds whose final value, whose actual and total success or failure, can only be real, or be known, from the point of view of the insight that faces the whole of real life, and with reference to the purposes of the will whose expression is the entire universe.